buchenwald

Today is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On January 27 1945, the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was liberated by Soviet troops.

The above image shows just some of the thousands upon thousands of wedding rings confiscated by the Nazis from victims of the Holocaust. These rings were found by US troops after liberating Buchenwald in 1945.

These are Buchenwald concentration camp guards who received a beating from the prisoners when the camp was liberated by the Americans. The picture was taken in April 1945, by the U.S. military photographer Elizabeth Miller.

Some SS guards donned civilian clothes and tried to escape. They were generally spotted by their former victims and savagely beaten. The lucky ones, like this man were rescued by the GIs and locked up for their own safety.

..let us remember those who suffered and perished then, those who fell with weapons in their hands and those who died with prayers on their lips, all those who have no tombs: our heart remains their cemetery.

4 year old Joseph Schleifstein, who survived the Holocaust by being kept hidden by his father, from Nazi officials inside Buchenwald concentration camp, is seen here shortly after his liberation in April, 1945 -

April 11, 1945 was the day that General George Patton’s Third Army liberated Buchenwald. When Rabbi Herschel Schacter, a U.S. Army chaplain, heard the news he quickly found his way into the infamous concentration camp built in Goethe’s hometown.

When he arrived the sights and smells were so devastating that he asked a passing lieutenant, “Are there any Jews alive here?” There were. The Army would liberate 21,000 prisoners.

Random note: Just a few days earlier there were 28,000 prisoners in the camp. As the Allied armies approached, the Nazis attempted a mass evacuation. One-quarter to one-third of the prisoners died of exhaustion.

Among the survivors Rabbi Schachter discovered one thousand orphans (including a teenager named Elie Wiesel, noted author and Nobel Peace Prize winner). Rabbi Shachter would eventually help evacuate the children to France, Switzerland, and Palestine.

Rabbi Schachter would spend weeks in the camp overseeing religious services and counseling victims. He would always remember those early days especially the victims desperately asking, “Does the world know what happened to us?”

Between its opening in 1937 and it’s liberation in 1945 it is estimated that 250,000 prisoners walked through the gates of Buchenwald. It is believed that 56,000 men were murdered over that eight year period. (The camp did house women but not until 1943 and I could find no information on their mortality rate in the camp.)

Rabbi Schachter was discharged from the military as a captain and returned to New York where he led Mosholu Jewish Center in The Bronx for fifty-two years, until it closed in 1999. He would take an interest in the plight of Soviet Jews, visiting the U.S.S.R. in 1956. Later he served as an advisor to President Richard Nixon.

On March 22 President Barack Obama and Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau met while the president visited Israel. During that time Rabbi Meir Lau spoke of Rabbi Schachter who he had met when he was only seven years old - one of the orphans that Rabbi Schachter had saved. Neither the president nor Rabbi Meir Lau knew that Rabbi Schachter had passed away a day earlier at the age of 95.